Musings and Sometimes Rants about the non-equal status of Fathers in Family Law and Parenting. Additionally periodic comparisons to the treatment of men compared to women in other areas including health care.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

The phenomena of wives cheating is not new as the author would have you believe. Every heterosexual relationship has two, sometimes more, parties. The women involved are often married and they cheat on about the same par as men.

They are far more discreet though and this service gives them that further outlet. Wives initiate 75% of divorces in Canada, a significant indicator they grow out of love far more frequently than the husband. If it isn't a new Barby Doll as a child its a new partner or more as an adult plus all the entitlements of sole physical custody (90%), child support, 50% of all property and often alimony Under those circumstances its best for dad to let her cheat and keep his fingers crossed she doesn't move in with the guy permanently..MJM

Infidelity service Ashley Madison says the honeymoon is over fast for GTA newlyweds, particularly women, as they hunt affairs

Published On Wed Apr 07 2010

Ashley Madison has seen female newlywed membership in the GTA jump from 3,184 to 12,442 in the past year - an almost 300 per cent increase.

SUBMITTED PHOTO

Nicole Baute, Living Reporter

Susan first dipped her toe into the murky cyberpool of infidelity two years ago, when she was bored at home on a day off from her part-time fitness job. Her husband, a business executive seven years her senior, was working, as usual.

Sexually frustrated and a little lonely, the 25-year-old started Googling “sex club” and “swingers club” before stumbling upon AshleyMadison.com, advertised as a “discreet dating service” for people in relationships. Like most Torontonians, Susan, who did not want her real name used, heard about it before.

Three months and more than a 1,000 profiles later, she sat at the bar at a Hooters restaurant with Michael, a 23-year-old with a 31-year-old wife. “He understood where I was coming from and we had the same expectations,” she says. After about two hours, they got a hotel room.

That was what she was really looking for.

According to Ashley Madison statistics, the number of Toronto-area female newlyweds on their site has skyrocketed in the past year. In March 2009, there were 3,184 women who had been married for three years or less actively using the service. A year later, there were 12,442.

Since he founded the service in 2001, it was clear to CEO Noel Biderman that attracting men would be easy. But he and his team thought their female clients would be desperate housewives or dedicated mistresses looking for “lifestyles and fun and sex and gifts.” They deliberately targeted women with everything from the name of the brand to the colour scheme of its advertising was designed to attract aspiring female cheaters.

They soon realized they had overlooked a robust and active demographic: “These were young women who, from their self-description ... were only married a year or two and seemed to really be questioning the institution, their next step, entering into parenthood, staying with that partner,” Biderman says. They called it their “newlywed marketplace.”

So much for those happy early years — the seven-year itch has shrunk to three or four and wives, not just husbands, are increasingly stepping up and sneaking out.

Infidelity is tricky for researchers to quantify because surveys largely rely on self-reporting, and people are inclined to lie according to the medium (online, on the phone or in person). And there is no one definition for infidelity — sometimes emotional and online affairs, and committed couples who are not married are included, other times not.

“There’s an overall increase in female infidelity in general,” says Ruth Houston, a New York-based infidelity expert. Houston’s research began more than 16 years ago, after she unintentionally recorded her husband’s phone conversations with three other women while working as a journalist from their home.

Houston is convinced we’re “in the midst of an infidelity epidemic” and goes by the often-cited stat that infidelity by women has increased by 50 per cent in the last 10 years. But the U.S. National Opinion Research Center report on American Sexual Behaviour offers much smaller figures: In 2004, 20.5 per cent of men and 11.7 per cent of women admitted to cheating on their spouses, a change from 21.3 and 10 per
cent in 1991.

Houston believes these numbers are deceptively low and that women are definitely catching up to men. She says today’s women are much more exposed to possible partners than their mothers and grandmothers. They’re out working and on the Internet, the top two places to cook up an affair.

“I just think that women are stronger and coming into themselves and following their own path,” says Toronto relationship therapist Nancy Ross.

She says infidelity is often what brings couples to seek therapy and that, increasingly, men are initiating therapy.

Biderman thinks female newlyweds are looking for more than a fling — that many of them are sizing up their husbands and questioning whether they really want to start a family with him. And, in a pragmatic move not unlike job hunting, they might even want to line up a new partner before leaving their current one.

“As more and more people get married later and later in life, does it really surprise you that a 30-year-old woman who just got married a year or two ago, but has a very robust career and is very independent, is really going to tolerate the same kind of failed expectations that someone two generations removed from her (did)?” he asks.

Or maybe it’s the digital era that is making young people so eager to move on, Biderman says. After all, past and future lovers are all just a mouse click away.

Susan, now 27, says she loves her husband and does not plan to leave him. More than that, she’s convinced Ashley Madison has helped her marriage: she’s made many friends who understand her, both male and female, and she’s now had four very satisfying affairs.

“I come home smiling after and I’m just fulfilled, which kind of cuts up my resentment toward my husband, because I just feel better — physically, emotionally, everything.”

InfidelityBusiness is booming for Ashley Madison
Ashley Madison membership is growing madly, which founder Noel Biderman ties, at least in part, to the economy. “Martial discord is very closely tied to economic issues,” Biderman says. “If you’re having challenges around your family finances, it’s really hard to all of a sudden turn on the intimacy dial and go upstairs and make passionate love to one another.”

Membership figures as of March 2010:In the GTA:
159,611 members (up from 82,959 a year ago)
111,202 male
48,409 female

All of Canada, U.S., U.K. and Australia
5,410,347 members (up from 2,802,664 a year ago)
3,898,468 male
1,511,879 female

The move by the Conservatives is very good news even from across the pond in Canada. It's gratifying to see the O'Connors back in the advocacy campaign for families and children's rights to have both parents in their lives.

The only question remains why did they have Facebook sites shut down as noted in the comments here and what are the motives behind this late move. If you read the Facebook page O'Connor has running on F4J you would think he was God's gift to both marketing and children.MJM

Tory backing for family law change

12:33pm Saturday 10th April 2010

THE reformed Hampshire-based Fathers 4 Justice campaign group has won Conservative backing for a change to family law.

The Tories have agreed a ten-point action plan which includes legal backing for shared child contact between separated parents.

They are promising to include the family law reforms in their general election manifesto next week.
Nadine O’Connor, wife of Fathers 4 Justice founder Matt O’Connor, has taken over the running of the controversial organisation which became known for its high profile stunts which saw costume-wearing dads scale Buckingham Palace, disrupt Parliament and take over a live National Lottery broadcast.

Nadine, who lives in Romsey, said: “This is the game-changing announcement we have been working towards.

“We look forward to working with the Conservative Party on ensuring this commitment becomes a reality for the thousands of children and families whose lives are blighted by the family courts.”

Romsey and Southampton North Conservative candidate Caroline Nokes is backing the move.
She said: “Families really are the bedrock of our community. I welcome the announcement and look forward to the ten points being implemented after the election.”

The men's studies Profs quoted in this article are decidedly pro third wave feminist and are sycophants towing the 3rd wave line that men are abusers and women perpetual victims. They are pro-gender studies in terms of males but their focus is gay males. If you visit their web site you will find them decidedly pro-gay, pro feminist but only on their terms. Masculinity for heterosexual males is not on their agenda.

The Profs who arranged this first historic seminar are very brave and have received copious criticism from feminists who see their entitlement based agenda as a zero sum game. In Ontario boys in JK to 12 seldom get a male teacher and may be feminized by the time they get out of high school. In the age group 20-30 female teachers outnumber men by over 4-1 and the trend is toward greater disparity. Boys are suffering from this and need a different teaching regime to deal with their energy not medication like Ritalin or more punishment.

Here are a few stats. Men are outnumbered in degrees grant by about 60%-40%, the federal and provincial public service is 55% female and with their emphasis on minorities white males are less inclined to be favoured, health care is dominated by females, social work is 95% female and this includes child protection, the latter are aligning themselves with the VAW feminist camp which will further marginalize dads, moms get 90% sole physical custody, dad is marginalized as a visitor but pays through the nose, but the boyfriend can move in for 24/7 access to the kids raising the chances they will be harmed. Single moms are the most likely to kill or harm the child. Its time for a new paradigm dealing with equality of gender not Zero Sum identity politics.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Small step for men

'Male studies' the answer to overcoming 'lace curtain,' scholars say

Janet Whitman, National Post

Retrodisk

Worried about "the declining state of today's male," a group of leading scholars gathered at the bucolic campus here this week for a mini-conference to tackle the problem.
But before the panellists could begin their discussion on the increasing powerlessness many men and boys feel, the symposium got pushed from its planned venue to make way for the announcement of a new men's basketball coach.

Miles Groth, a Wagner professor specializing in the psychology of being male and the event's host, shook his head.

"We planned this thing three months ago," he said on the sidelines of the alternative site as the conference was gearing up to go live online to participants in five different continents.

The ironic indignity might just be the first of many slights and obstacles as the academics attempt to establish what they say will be a first for modern man: a male studies program. Their hope is to begin offering degrees in the new academic discipline at a major research university -- perhaps a Harvard, a Columbia, a Stanford --within the next couple of years.

When word of the conference started spreading on the Internet last week, some observers wondered whether it was an April Fool's joke. After all, isn't most of what people read in newspapers, watch on the news and study at university about men?

But Wagner's Prof. Groth said that view fails to appreciate the well-documented decline of the state of men and boys, particularly those under the age of 35, over the past 15 to 18 years.

"It's just now beginning to surface in the job market, in academe and in the offices of counsellors and psychologists," he said. "[Male studies] is not to look at a few men who are CEOs and have a tremendous amount of money. I'm talking about what Australians call a bloke. Today's five-and six-year-old boys into their 20s just don't know who they're supposed to be."

While not exactly an endangered species, men are in danger of becoming an underclass, the panel of PhDs specializing in boys and men warned.

In the latest recession, 82% of pink slips handed out in the United States went to men, and a good chunk of those jobs won't be coming back. Boys and young men commit suicide at a rate of more than four times that of girls and young women. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin. In the United States, women outlive men by an average of seven years. In Eastern Europe the gap is 15 years. At universities in the United States and Canada, women make up about 60% of the student population, men only 40%, a dramatic reversal from the early days of feminism.

Amid this growing divide between the sexes, 90% of the academic resources for gender studies are devoted to women, said Prof. Edward Stephens, chairman of the newly launched Foundation for Male Studies, which aims to raise US$2-million or more to endow a chair for the discipline at a major university.

"What are the ethics of devoting 90% of academic resources to one gender?" he asked the gathering and the roughly 250 participants listening in via videoconference. "What are the unintended consequences of the failure of our academic institutions to consider the 21st century needs of males?"

As a young psychiatrist, Prof. Stephens gave his daughter a gender-neutral name -- Jarret -- so that she might have an easier time breaking through the so-called glass ceiling many women encounter as they try to advance in the workplace.

Now, he said, there's a new phenomenon: "the lace ceiling" or "the lace curtain."

"We as men and males can see through it, but we can't get through it," he said.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, told the story of how her son went to a camp where the kids were asked to go off each on his or her own into the desert with a pencil, a notebook, a candle and matches to write a journal about their feelings.

The girls did exactly as they were told, while the boys went in a pack and built a bonfire with the notebooks and pencils.

The creative-writing sensitivity trainer "thought they were sociopaths," Ms. Hoff Sommers said. "I'm concerned that male-averse attitude is widespread in the United States, that we're in a society where masculinity is politically incorrect."

Enter the need for male studies.

Only in its infancy, the proposed field of study has already attracted some dissention -- from men. Specifically, from professors in "men's studies," an academic subfield that started emerging in the 1980s as part of women's and gender studies programs.

Robert Heasley, president of the American Men's Studies Association, rejected an invitation to sit on the panel because of what he viewed as a combative attitude toward feminism. "If what they're presenting -- that feminism has hurt men and oppressed boys -- had some data to support it might be fine," he said in an interview. "It's not like men don't have challenges, but they tend to present it in a way that says feminism has done this to men. Men's rights are like having whites' rights."

Panellist Rocco "Chip" Capraro, director of Men's Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., said vast teaching and research about men already is underway and ought to remain "pro-feminist" so the reality of sexism is acknowledged.

The rest of the panel scoffed at both notions. They argued men's studies is generally limited to sociology and filtered through a feminist lens. The upshot: Boys can't necessarily just be boys. Instead, they argued, boys and men are considered to be inadequate girls and women.

The scholars of boys and men behind the proposed male studies program said they have no interest in replicating women's studies or men's studies programs.

Unlike men's studies programs, male studies -- assuming it ever gets off the ground -- will be offered as a major course of study. It will not only include sociology, but also take into account biology, evolution, history, literature, anthropology, education, law, medicine and psychology.

The program will have to do a certain amount of bashing of some strains of feminism, particularly the ideological kind, said Paul Nathanson, a professor of religious studies at McGill who cowrote books on misandry -- the hatred of boys and men.

"The fact is that much of this misandry is being generated by feminists," he said. "Not all feminists. [But] there are some fundamental features of ideological feminism over the last 30 or 40 years that we need to question."
Even egalitarian feminism can unwittingly deny men the possibility of establishing a healthy collective identify because, by saying men and women are equal, the implication is that men and women should be the same, Prof. Nathanson said.

Women's studies programs got their start in the late 1960s as part of the second wave of feminist activism. But they've been on the wane in the past several years. Some programs such as Guelph University's have shut down altogether, while many others have changed their names to add more inclusive words such as "gender," "sexuality," and "social justice."

The male studies advocates on the panel said that women's studies programs and women's institutes are still going strong and can pose a danger to men and boys because they often teach that women live in a state of siege.

One of the first things teenagers get when they leave home to go to college is a rape seminar, said Lionel Tiger, a Montreal native who is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of The Decline of Males and Men in Groups. "Male students are informed right at the outset that they are predatory and dangerous organisms, and women are informed that they are potential victims."

He described feminism as "a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of maleness as a force, as a phenomenon."

Ms. Hoff Sommers, the author of The War Against Boys, said although she's critical of the feminist establishment, male studies proponents could learn a lot from its members.

When girls had a serious deficit in math, for instance, feminists galvanized around the problem and test scores in the subject strengthened.

By imitating feminists, in the same way, boys could become stronger in reading and writing, she said. "But we don't have to imitate the ideological extremes in denigrating the opposite sex."

Meghan Carboni, a senior psychology major with a minor in gender studies at Wagner, said she found the college's gender studies program too focused on females.

Wagner offers only one male studies class: the psychology of men, taught by Prof. Groth.
"It's the best course I've ever taken. That's what made me realize what's being left out," Ms. Carboni said. "Everyone loved the course. They didn't realize how big an issue it was."

Prof. Stephens, the Male Studies Foundation chairman, said the group plans to wait until it has a US$2-million cheque in hand before approaching colleges about having a chair endowed for the program and a faculty established.

"Two million is on the low side. I've been thinking bigger numbers because the work to be done is so immense," he said in an interview. "What's happening right now because of this lace ceiling is you can't even get a hearing."

In the meantime, the foundation is putting together a marketing plan and will hold its first major conference in early October at the New York Academy of Medicine. The group will introduce Male Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal next year.

About Me

I am Politically active and right of centre on most issues with the odd exception such as legalization of "Mary Jane".
I advocate on changes to Family Law - an incredibly dysfunctional arena where parents are pitted against one another and children are the victims.
My picture will sometimes show me as a younger man simply because I like them.

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Leading causes of Injury to Women 2006

In 2006, unintentional falls were the leading cause of nonfatal injury among women of every age group, and rates generally increased with age. Women aged 65 years and older had the highest rate of injury due to unintentional falls (59.7 per 1,000 women), while slightly more than 19 per 1,000 women aged 18–34 and 35–44 years experienced fall-related injuries. Unintentional injuries sustained as motor vehicle occupants were the second leading cause of injury among 18- to 34-year-olds (18.7 per 1,000), while unintentional overexertion was the second leading cause of injury among women aged 35–44 and 45–64 years (13.7 and 9.3 per 1,000, respectively). Among women aged 65 years and older, being unintentionally struck by or against an object was the second leading cause of injury (5.7 per 1,000).

Injury related Emergency Department Visits

Unintentional and intentional injuries each represented a higher proportion of emergency department (ED) visits for men than women in 2005. Among women and men aged 18 years and older, unintentional injuries accounted for 19.9 and 27.5 percent of ED visits, respectively, while intentional injuries, or assault, represented 1.4 and 2.7 percent of visits, respectively. Among both women and men, unintentional injury accounted for a higher percentage of ED visits among those living in non-metropolitan areas, while adults living in metropolitan areas had a slightly higher percentage of ED visits due to intentional injury.